A blog for Literature and Culture of the Middles Ages (ENGL:3226:0001)

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Medieval Jews as Scapegoats

As we’ve seen multiple times in literature for this course, the Jewish
community often took the fall for crimes committed against Christians. In several readings—The Prioress’ Tale,
The Child Slain by Jews, Theophilus—Jews are the clear-cut villains,
murdering virtuous Christian children and enticing Christian men to make blood pacts
with the Devil (who has apparently nested deep within their Jewish hearts. Charming.) We have briefly discussed a question that will inevitably cross any
modern reader’s mind: How could these people—the characters in the story, the
authors of the tales, the medieval audience—have believed in this portrayal of
the Jews? How could they have justified
such unerring prejudice, even decades after the majority of the Jewish community
had been expelled from England in 1290?
There may not be a clear answer, but by looking at a time of similar
bigotry—the early spread of the Black Death in the mid-14th century—some
light can be shed on the correlation between Jewish presence and Christian
anxieties.

Steven F. Kruger’s
“The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe” explains that the
Christian community’s ability to construct a social identity was dependent on
the “othering” of non-Christians, in order to maintain “a religious hegemony
crucial to Western European hierarchical (Chrsitian, masculinist, heterosexist)
society” (25). The desire for a
solidified Christian identity—both personal and social—must have been present
throughout plague-time, which was arguably the height of anxiety for medieval Christians
and Jews (and every other mortal race) alike.

Victims of the Plague

To set the scene
a bit: The Bubonic Plague, commonly referred to as the Black Death, was an
awful disease that spread throughout medieval Europe like wildfire. The symptoms included these huge black abscesses
called “buboes” which were painful and pus-filled and generally popped up in a
person’s lymph nodes—meaning sick people were lying around, moaning and crying,
with painful black swellings around their throat, armpits, and groin. The Black Death could essentially kill
someone overnight, and had such a high mortality rate that you might have seen
the majority of your family wiped out in under a week. People had no clue what caused it, and so
speculations flew. Astrology, humors,
and the classic Wrath of God were all possibilities, but the only explanation
that offered a quick-fix cure came down to human agency: The Jews must have
poisoned the drinking wells.

Jews being burned for poisoning the wells

Nevermind the
fact that Jews and Christians drank from the same wells and were dying in equal
numbers; after centuries of tension, the Jewish community was an easy target. Still, despite widespread antisemitic sentiments,
how could Christians—who had lived and worked alongside Jews for generations—truly
believe that their neighbors were the heartless Devil-worshippers of
folklore? It is true that certain
Jews confessed to the well-poisoning allegations (most notably Agimet of Geneva),
which would have assuaged the guilt that Christians might have felt in accusing
them; despite the fact that these confessions were almost certainly a result of
torture, Jews were still murdered en masse for their alleged crimes. More likely, the pervasive “othering”
of the Jewish community over the span of centuries finally culminated in the
justification of Christian violence against what we today can recognize as a
blameless community. In medieval reality
and literature alike, the Jewish community often suffered for Christian piece
of mind.